We're Not Like Other Digital Planners: 5 Features You Won't Find Anywhere Else

Central to the Ripple Planner experience is the idea that living an aligned life—one rooted in purpose, passion, presence, and possibility—is created by focusing on Three Core Pillars: having a Clear Life Vision, taking Aligned Action , and engaging in Regular Reflection .

• Clear Life Vision: Your unique dreams, aspirations, hopes and plans for the future that are guiding you toward your highest potential.
• Aligned Action: The steps you need to take to align your thoughts and behaviors with your Clear Life Vision.
• Regular Reflection: A system for pausing and assessing your progress toward your goals, harmony within the 6 Core Life Areas, overall wellbeing, and alignment with your Clear Life Vision.

Now, you might be asking— How is this any different than other planners or productivity systems?

Here’s the truth:

Most physical & digital planners and productivity systems are missing one or more of these Three Core Pillars. Think about your past experiences with planning. Most systems have a big focus on Aligned Action —taking steps toward your goals—but often forget to ask: Are these goals truly aligned with your Clear Life Vision?

Or, if you love journaling, you might have reached new levels of self-awareness and inner wisdom, but you’re still not seeing meaningful changes in your day-to-day life.

You need ALL Three Core Pillars to make meaningful, sustained progress in your life.

Here's why:

• Failure To Hold A Clear Life Vision = Missing The Forest For The Trees: You're making progress towards something, but eventually you’ll turn around and realize...whoops! I've been moving in the wrong direction, and wasted a lot of time, effort, and energy.
• Not Taking Aligned Action = You're A Dreamer, Baby: This is what happens when you have an expansive view on what you’re capable of creating for your life, but you never roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty to bring it to life. You ideate on things, you think ‘wouldn’t it be nice’, but you wake up every morning, and you never change the person you’re being, the way that you’re acting, and the decisions you’re making to bring those visions into reality.
• Not Engaging In Regular Reflection = Living Life By Someone Else’s Design: Without Regular Reflection, there's a risk that your actions are more driven by ego or external pressures, not by a true alignment with your deeper purpose and Clear Life Vision. You may be moving forward in some way, but when you take the time to pause, evaluate, and reflect, you might find you’ve been following someone else’s playbook instead of your own path. You need to ask yourself: Are the things I'm doing still in line with what matters to me? Am I really, truly happy with the way I'm spending my time and my approach toward life?

The good news is that every single product in the Ripple Planner ecosystem—including the Mid-Year Digital Planner—supports one or more of these pillars so you'll have all your bases covered!

How You Do It: Eat The Frog 

In this context, the "frog" represents whatever you're dreading or avoiding doing, and "eating" it means getting it done and out of the way. Eating the frog helps you Face The Fire by providing a structured system for addressing the areas of your life where resistance shows up.

The Ripple Planner Mid-Year Digital Planner is designed to make 'Facing The Fire' a daily habit. With the ‘Face The Fire’ box on every page, you’ll be reminded to tackle the task you’ve been avoiding and get it out of the way first thing. This proactive approach to facing resistance is at the heart of what makes the Mid-Year Digital Planner more than just a planner—it's a tool for lasting personal growth.

'Eating The Frog' As A Daily Practice

1. Pinpoint the task you feel most resistant toward doing from your "Get To-Dos List" or "Most Important Things" list.
2. Add it to the ‘Face The Fire’ box in your daily page.
3. Make a plan to tackle it as early in the day as possible. If you can complete it as the very first thing you do in the day, even better!

Tips For Facing The Fire

• Focus on your energetic frogs first. If something is dramatically impacting your mood and how you’re showing up yourself, it’s going to have a huge impact on the things that you do and the outcomes you get. Clean up your energy first and gift yourself more ease for the rest of your day.

• Identify things that are both high impact (drive results) and high leverage (increase efficiency and make your life easier)

• Be realistic. If you want to write a book but you’re not currently a writer, you wouldn’t tell yourself to sit down and write three chapters tomorrow. But what you would do is tell yourself to wake up and write for 30 minutes straight before you do anything else for the day. Break big things down into smaller chunks.
• Finish it. Whatever you identified as your frog, you need to fully complete the task before the day ends.
• Celebrate yourself. When you celebrate yourself for doing something hard, it gives you dopamine, which then encourages you to do more hard things.

What Living Outside Yourself IS

• Being present and fully engaging with the moment, and offering the highest expression of what you're able to give.
• Asking, "What is this moment asking of me?" and meeting the moment, rather than leading with ego.
• Operating from and understanding that in every moment, your impact is either positive or negative (because there's almost no such thing as neutrality!).
• Reflecting on whether or not YOU would want to be on the receiving end of your thoughts, words, and actions.
• Being fully engaged with your surroundings and the people that you're with. Set aside distractions such as technology, worries about the future or rumination about the past, fears and anxieties about what 'could' happen, etc. Focus your attention fully on the present moment as much as you can, and when you notice it start to wander, gently guide it back to the present.
• When you're thinking of ways that you can live outside of yourself on a daily basis, these can be pre-planned and intentional OR can be something that springs from the moment.

What Living Outside Yourself IS NOT

• Doing things or serving from a place that feels self-sacrificial.
• Serving others not because you genuinely want to, but because you're hoping to receive something (E.g. love, positive favor, etc.). This is called 'giving to receive' and sets all parties involved up for failure and weird energetics.
• Trying to fix people or doing things that enable or encourage self-victimization and negative behavior from others.

Why It Matters

When you decenter yourself in your own life by 'Living Outside Yourself', you open up space for greater empathy, connection, and growth, allowing you to fully engage with the world around you. This shift fosters deeper relationships, increases self-awareness, and creates a positive impact, ultimately leading to a more meaningful and fulfilling life.